Re: The Security Übermensch

[Jay Vaughan]

An excellent and composed discourse on your position, Tony .. I respond to some points which struck me quite intelligent:

On 06/09/2013, at 3:08 PM, Tony Scharf <entropymagnet at noisetheorem.com> wrote:

> By spying on the people from which the power to govern is derived the government loses all right to complain when it is in turn spied on.  In fact, they leave us little choice but to spy.

I've never considered the fact that I have no clue whatsoever what the government is doing on a daily basis, to be very settling at all.  In fact from a very young age, I simply abandoned any interest in government due to the obscurity and obfuscation of the entire subject.  Its not some added feature to our society which I felt I learned about adequately and participate in properly, but rather an industry in and of itself, tied very much to every single persons' survival, yet at the same time, disconnected completely from the individual.

Government is just 'out there', and I sort of trust this 'super-'organism to be doing its job. I guess someone is doing their job in the end, and a lot of very good government occurs along the way, let us not forget, because there are a lot of people out here in the world who are *not* killing each other, and who *do* get along just fine with managing their resources around them, such that everyone wins.  Somehow.

And this aspect of this super-being/entity is something that I just don't perceive, in any technical sense, other than at the tip of the spear.  Must I really become a lawyer to be able to keep pace with government, at a simple level?  It seems so.

So your suggestion that we spy on the spies rings for me.  Why do we not, in fact, just all have free and unwilling access to every single thing that someone does, in our names, with ease?

Because government - like all human activities, always and forever - is continually being subverted.  Actively.  "Sub-"consciously.  By other, 'super-'entities, such as corporations, leagues, religions, countless forms of institution, association, and so on..

The Open-Source politics in me suggests that we can actually fix this.  Its a technological problem as well as an ethical one.  I'm not sure that Liquid Democracy is the solution (Pirate Party), but its a start.


>   I tend to believe that this is just an unintended consequence of creating what essentially becomes a primitive collective consciousness, an oversoul that we all tap into digitally at this point (though in the future, that connection may become much more complete and intimate).

These 'collective consciousnesses' that you describe, or 'super-'entities, or 'hiveminds', or 'consumer market groups', or whatever we call them .. we have a lot of them running the planet right now.  They're all connected.  Its going to be very hard to defeat the people running the highly-destructive companies such as Monsanto and Raytheon, in an ideological sense, because there are a mighty *lot* of people working in that industry, and their ideology is *aligned* at the same time there are active procedures and methodologies being run on the social stage in order to *prevent* other alignment occurring, by other groups.  Witness the destruction of the Tea Party.  Witness the undermining of the Occupy movement.  Witness countless human-rights groups activities being dissembled, in industrial fashion, over the last hundred years - and even still today, we will find subversion occurring.

Its a battlefield of ideology versus ideology, a massive sphere of interconnected mental activity, all boiling down to just a few small things: who has the food, and who has the bomb.  Who gets to sleep safe at night, and who simply die, unnoticed.

Government is in the business of answering these questions, and that is the problem in my personal opinion.  Humans should never enslave themselves as products, but oh boy: we do it.  The mere fact that we are treated as consumers is the clue.


> There is actually a book I read some time in the 90's by David Brin (?) called 'Earth'. 

Great recommendation!

;
--
Jay Vaughan